title: Is the periodic health examination worthwhile?
abstract: Periodic health examinations is a primary tool in the practice of preventive medicine. It has been identified as such and promoted for health maintenance and disease control since the early 1900s. And yet, it has never been proved cost-effective. In fact, recently is has become fashionable for certain physicians to challenge the professional time and public money spent on examinations of asymptomatic adults as nonproductive and wasteful, urging medical care only in the presence of complaints suggesting illness. A balanced assessment of the value of periodic health examinations requires definition of the content and method of the examination, the individuals to be examined, and the frequency with which the examination is performed. Some procedures have no or very little yield under any circumstances. Most procedures will be more effective for certain groups of examinees, particularly with reference to age and family and environmental factors. During the past decade, methods for health hazard or risk factor analysis have been developed which enable design of more efficient periodic health examination programming, targetting those population subgroups most apt to be harboring presymptomatic disease. It can be anticipated that refinement of risk-related examination methods in the next decade will firmly establish the value of periodic health examination as a basic tool in medical practice.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000570:American Cancer Society; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000191:economics; D010808:Physical Examination; D012306:Risk; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States